WITH TWO HUSBANDS.

Taihape Daily Times, Issue 220, 6 September 1917, Page 2

WITH TWO HUSBANDS.

FIRST ONE PAILS TO SECURE DIVORCE. Mrs. Mary Timchik has the distinettion of being the legal wife of two men. Her position has been fixed for, her by Mr. Justice Greenhaum refusing a divorce Iff George Timchik, her first husband, who, named his wife’s second husband as co-respondent. Mr and Mrp Timchik married in 1906 and separated in 1908. Seven years later Mrs. Timchik made a wide spread search for her husband, but without success. Believing him dead she remarried. Then Mr. Timchik reappeared, and brought his suit for divorce.

“Where one enters into a second marriage,” sai(J, Mr. Justice Greenbaum, “after an absence of five consecutive years of the husband or wife, as the case may be, in good faith and in the belief that the former spouse is dead, the second marriage is lawful,” The judge stated that any of the three persons may bring a suit for annulment of the second marriage, which, if granted, would restore the woman as the wife of her first husband. Meanwhile the second marriage must be considered in force and the first one in abeyance. (In New Zealand the reappearance of a vanished husband makes the second marriage of his wife null and void. Tennyson’s poem of “Enoch Arden,” in which the returned husband hid his identity in order - that his wife’s second marrage should not be upset, is based on bigamy.)